One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Tim Hilton

magazines. Others had ‘day jobs’ and wrote in the evenings. The touring writers were also the lecturers who went round halls and clubrooms and institutes with heavy boxes of lantern slides. Often these lecturer-writers used pseudonyms. Here are some of their assumed names: ‘Kuklos’, ‘Chater’, ‘Wayfarer’, ‘Winona’, ‘Cotter Pin’, ‘Ragged Staff’, ‘The Gangrel’, ‘The Potterer’ and‘George a ’Green’.

      ‘Kuklos’, the most interesting of them, was a man called Fitzwater Wray. His writing was held to be authoritative until about 1950, partly because of his great age. (One of his stories recounted a ride from Bradford to London in 1898, when the Great North Road still had grass in the middle of its rutted surfaces – or so he claimed.) ‘Kuklos’ was shrewd. He acted as an agent for sending ‘city dwellers’ on farmhouse holidays, so he has a place in the history of the tourist industry. He wrote a cycling column for the Daily News (some of his pieces were collected in A Vagabond’s Notebook, 1908) and he had enough French to recognise and translate Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu